Bidding on Hotel Rooms Just Got a Lot Better

A new hotel booking site is aiming to take the mystery out of bidding on a room.

The new hotel booking site Stayful is aiming to take the mystery out of bidding on a room. The service, which has launched with hotels in six cities, shows users an array of independent and boutique hotels, a recommended bid for each, and a "Book Now" option to book immediately. It's a new spin on what the industry calls blind booking, in which users bid on a room without knowing the exact property in which they might spend the night. Unlike what happens on Priceline or Hotwire, though, bidders on Stayful know exactly what they're going to get.

There's another useful element to Stayful's system: The site suggests a bid that will likely be approved immediately without lots of back and forth with the hotel. In its attempt to assign a fair value to a given hotel room on a given night, it shares some DNA with The Suitest, another new hotel site that uses hedge fund-style algorithms to determine what you should be paying as opposed to what a hotel might be asking. The average savings for users over standard rates, says Stayful co-founder Cheryl Rosner, are about 27%, depending on the property and the dates of a stay.

While the site only offers independent hotels in six cities for now—Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco—more will soon be added, Cheryl says. Stayful also hopes to add soon additional tools so users can better compare individual hotel rooms and their amenities to determine the best room for a given stay.